All-news radio

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For the television series NewsRadio, see NewsRadio.

All-news radio is a radio format devoted entirely to discussion and broadcast of news.

All-news radio is available in both local and syndicated forms, and is carried in some form on both major US satellite radio networks. Some all-news stations, like KFWB and WCBS, carry sports, and all-news stations may occasionally carry public affairs programs, simulcasts of TV news magazine or political affairs shows like 60 Minutes and Face the Nation. Some former all news stations, like KNX and WBZ, now run talk radio programs on weekends and during off peak hours. Most of these stations are owned by CBS Radio, and therefore are affiliated with the CBS radio network.

Many stations brand themselves Newsradio but only run continuous news during the morning and afternoon drive times. These stations are properly labeled as "news/talk" talk radio stations. Also, some National Public Radio stations identify themselves as News and Information stations, which means that in addition to running the NPR news magazines like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, they run other information programs such as Day to Day, Talk of the Nation, and the BBC World Service.

1 History
2 Stations
3 Related links
4 External links

[edit] History

Radio programmer Gordon McLendon, who has been credited with pioneering top 40, background music and telephone talk formats, is generally acknowledged to have put the first all-news format on the air. It happened in the 1960s on XETRA, a station licensed to Tijuana, Mexico, that could be heard as far away as Los Angeles.

Its format, which can be heard to this day on many all-news stations, was to start each half hour with world and national news, preferably from a network, then switch to locally-anchored area news, filling out the half hour with sports, business news and features. XETRA had no outside reporters and got all of its local news from the AP and UPI wire services.

Group W, the broadcast division of Westinghouse, adopted a second kind of all-news format, using 20-minute rather than 30-minute cycles that eschewed network newscasts so that local and non-local news could be freely mixed, according to what was more interesting or important on any given day. Westinghouse also used field reporters at its all-news stations, which including WINS New York and KFWB Los Angeles. WINS began broadcasting in April 1965. A second New York all-news station, WCBS began all-news programming on August 28, 1967, although its first broadcasts were on its sister FM station after a plane crashed into its tower, knocking the AM station off the air.

In 1975, the NBC Radio Network shut down its profitable weekend music and information service "NBC Monitor" to launch the News & Information Service, the first all-news radio network. It was closed two years later in a cost-cutting move though it had strong ratings in some key markets.

All-news has for years been a top-rated radio format in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities, but as big city traffic worsens and people work longer hours that increase the urgency of planning their day ahead the focus of such stations has increasingly been on traffic and weather, often updated every 10 minutes.